Psychotomimesis

Initially, scientists called these drugs "psychotomimetic," which meant "of, relating to, involving, or inducing psychotic alteration of behavior and personality." Longtime viewers will remember the entire MK-ULTRA debacle, the farming out of the psychedelic movement to agents Kesey and Leary, the deliberate deception practiced upon the general audience, convincing them that this kind of madness was dangerous to the children; we only mention this in passing, offering some slight context as to what the United States government was doing with the so-called psychotomimetic substances while much more serious, and ultimately dangerous, research took itself underground.

The average researcher at InfiniTek in the late 1960s, before the company became the global pharmaceuticals and advanced weaponry conglomerate that it is today, had no idea what turns his work would take. It was only after almost nine years of research into substances that today pose an enormous threat that one man, Dr. Canton Levery, finally fled the company's headquarters (at that time in East Berlin, now relocated to London) and escaped to America. Dr. Levery's inside reports of the often chilling work underway at InfiniTek is only now being prepped for Internet release by FringeWare, now that InfiniTek itself is in a shambles due to poor management and meddling by outside influences (rumors that InfiniTek began as a tool for disseminating alien technology throughout the world economy are of course entirely unfounded). But we can offer you this hopefully enlightening excerpt, taken from a recent interview with Dr. Levery at his current home on a small island in the Caribbean:

"Well, at that time, as you know, InfiniTek was closely linked with CIA efforts to understand the psychotic properties of drugs such as LSD, DMT, mescaline, and so on. The weapons division had been supplying the U.S. with technology for years, but here we were seeing a conflict of interest between InfiniTek's weapons division and its pharmaceuticals division. My bosses honestly believed they could find a way to use the psychotomimetic properties of these drugs for medicinal purposes, the most notable 'grail' of course being a solid cure for schizophrenia.

"Keep in mind that LSD itself was viewed as rather prosaic compared to some of the compounds our researchers were able to invent once they had the proper budget. Our molecular modeling software was literally decades ahead of any competitors - the CIA included - and we were able to find thousands of active substances and actually build them using technology that I have yet to understand. I can't begin to catalogue for you the impressive array of alterants we tested in those days. There's probably still a vault on the fifty-ninth floor that has shelves of active samples, if anyone dared try to get inside the building (ed. note: the InfiniTek headquarters building in London is currently quarantined due to what recent press releases call 'uncontrolled mutation of several unrelated experiments' spanning all three of InfiniTek's major divisions, including the nascent biogenetic engineering division).

"Well, what happened was, out of all these compounds, we came down to about a hundred that we thought were solid leads. Almost all of them had active properties similar to that of LSD, but tweaked in some fashion. We began human testing, setting up labs in London and Manchester for the purpose. For the most part, the psychotomimetic properties of these substances were interesting but certainly not capable of curing anyone of any kind of madness. The most we could get was an hour or two of lucidity out of compounds twenty-three through twenty-nine, an hour where the subject was not hearing voices or feeling entirely paranoid and was capable of clear, cogent conversation. Invariably, however, the effect would wear off and the madness would seem to be slightly more aggravated, as though the subjects could remember now that they had once been sane but could do nothing about it. Tolerance to these drugs built up too quickly for them to be of any use, and we eventually abandoned that track.

"One substance in particular, however, proved to be remarkable for a particular effect: the subjects never came down.

"Now you and I both know that the average psychedelic tripper almost always comes across a moment during one or more of their trips where they start to believe they are never coming down. Well ö imagine your surprise if you wound up on a drug which felt a lot like LSD to you, but you in fact never DID come down. The test subjects would enter the peak of the experience, and then STAY there. Permanently. This was no longer psychotomimesis - this was full-scale drug-induced psychosis. It was hard to watch. The subjects, these young boys, at first they'd think they were really having a good time, and then the hours would go by, and some of them, you know, they knew a little bit about acid in those days and figured they should be coming down at some point, and when they realized they weren't going to come down at all, you could watch their minds just snap, one by one. 'Bad trip' doesn't even remotely describe the scene. After about a week or more of solid peaking on these substances, it was safe to say that the subjects no longer retained even the remotest portions of their former personalities. It was as though someone had decided to reformat their hard drives, to use a crass metaphor.

"I'm only mentioning this now because the CIA eventually did get hold of this substance, due to political intrigue within InfiniTek that never should have happened. It would be a simple matter to spring this stuff on a given population, the same way cocaine and heroin spread by way of CIA introduction. You'd think you were getting average street acid, and before you knew it, you'd be a babbling idiot, and then by the end of the week, you'd be empty meat, fresh for the imprinting. They never figured out how to cure any particular psychoses, but they came a long way in the study of inducing psychoses - it's always easier to destroy than create, after all."